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August 9, 2017

A GHOST STORY: A MEDITATION ON TIME, REMEMBRANCE AND LOSS

What is time but loss? Loss of youth, of companionship. The process of
becoming and of declining. David Lowery’s “A Ghost Story” is about time and
loss and opens with an epigram, the first line of Virginia Woolf’s story “A
Haunted House”: “Whatever hour you woke up there was another door shutting.”
Woolf’s story might better be described as a prose poem. At 1,949 words, it
does not tell a story as much as sketch an atmosphere, and you – the reader,
the necessary reader of the tale – are set within the narrative from that first
sentence. Then, “From room to room they went…a ghostly couple.”

“Here we left it,”
she said. And he added, “Oh, but here too!” “It’s upstairs,” she murmured. “And
in the garden,” he whispered “Quietly,” they said, “or we shall wake them.”

But it wasn’t that
you woke us. Oh, no. “They’re looking for it; they’re drawing the curtain,” one
might say, and so read on a page or two. “Now they’ve found it,” one would be
certain, stopping the pencil on the margin. And then, tired of reading, one
might rise and see for oneself …. “What did I come in here for? What did I want
to find?”

Narrator and reader blur, and “us” (“But it wasn’t that you woke us.”),
the narrator and her husband we are to assume, cohabit with the ghostly couple
in their house, ghosts who “seek their joy,” “the Treasure” buried in the room
– a treasure, we quickly realize, that is not any material thing but the memory
and the love they made together in the house “hundreds of years ago.”

Casey Affleck as C. Photo Credit: Bret Curry. Courtesy of A24

Like “A Haunted House,” “A Ghost Story” is and is not a ghost story and
like Woolf's tale, is ultimately a love story. Rooney Mara and Casey
Affleck play M and C, a couple living in a house somewhere. He wants to stay because
he feels a sense of the history they have together there. She wants to move,
and his unwillingness to discuss their future weighs on their relationship. Then
he dies in an auto accident and is on a table in a morgue. The camera frames
the viewing room and his body under the sheet, until, after she sees him for
the final time and departs, he rises slowly from the table. The camera sits,
not for seconds but for minutes.

Lowery renders the ghost, not as ectoplasm or vortex or translucent
dismembered head, but reduced to a child’s Halloween costume – a mere sheet
with cutouts for the eyes. The sheeted ghost is fitting for a deceptively
simple plot: A man dies and his ghost has nowhere to go but home. In fact, the
austerity of Lowery’s cinematic effects contributes, like Woolf’s elusive
syntax and carefully measured vocabulary, to a narrative arc that moves from
lyrical to symphonic in a mere 92 minutes. Lowery employs ghost story tropes – tracking
shots down empty hallways; a creaking door; buzzing, flickering lights; an
unexpected crash or two – but nothing that might cause fright.

The cinematography by Andrew Droz Palermo has an almost monochromatic
feel in the interior shots, but when the story ventures out of doors, the
landscapes are rich and vast. Lowery asked that Daniel Hart’s haunting original
score draw inspiration from Woolf’s story, and the concluding piece “Safe,
Safe, Safe” echoes the sibilance and the comfort that the line imparts to
Woolf’s tale. Again and again, the score incorporates the Picardy third –
raising the third of an expected minor triad by a semitone to create a major
triad resolution. This produces an effect of joyousness when our expectation is
melancholy. Not surprisingly, then, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” will figure into
the thematic concerns of the film, as well.

“A Ghost Story” is structured in juxtapositions of montage sequences
and static shots. In the era of the fast-cut, Lowery is not afraid for the
camera to do nothing but record. An establishing medium long shot becomes the
static point of view for an entire scene. Not only does this challenge our
conventional contemporary movie-going experience, the approach imposes the
experience of time on us. For many, movies are a means of escape, and escapism is
to be distracted from the experience of time. That terrible, almost tragic, expression
about killing time expresses a desire to kill something so dearly precious and
limited to each of us. Lowery seeks, instead, to intensify the experience of time, and then,
by contrast, move us through a series of montages that communicate the passage
of days, then years, then centuries.

It is impossible not to see in Lowery’s atmospheric visual style and
melancholic lyricism an unmistakable homage to Terrence Malick. Some critics
argued this made his 2013 feature debut “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints,” which he
also wrote and directed and which also stars Mara and Affleck, merely
derivative and uninspired, but there was something brewing in it that augered
more. In “A Ghost Story,” Lowery has rendered a transporting meditation on time
and human experience, and though Malik’s influence is evident, Lowery explores
similar thematic elements with an elegant economy of emotion and duration in
stark contrast to Malik’s excesses witnessed in all their grandeur in the 2011,
intensely autobiographical “Tree of Life.”

Beginning with Malick in the 1970s, a certain subset of directors
emerged from Texas – including Julian Schnabel and Richard Linklater – a subset
that Lowery with “A Ghost Story” may be destined to join. Malick was born in
Illinois in 1943 but attended St. Stephen’s Episcopal boarding school in
Austin, Texas, and most of his films exude a sense isolation experienced in the
soft light of the Texas Plains. Brooklyn-born (1951) transplant to Brownsville,
Texas, the New York-based painter Julian Schnabel’s 2007 “The Diving Bell and
the Butterfly” is a profound meditation on the capacity of loss to heighten
experience and on the mind’s ability to make time non-linear. His new cinematic
project “At Eternity’s Gate,” about Vincent Van Gogh (Willem Dafoe) and his
time in Arles and Auvers-sur-Oise, Schnabel describes as “…a film about
painting and a painter, and their relationship to infinity.”

Richard Linklater was born in Houston, Texas, in 1960, and the
Linklater films that interest me most are those that take on issues of time and
our place in it: the animated “Waking Life” (2001), which questions the nature
of reality, consciousness, free will and existence itself; the “Before” trilogy
filmed over the course of 18 years – “Before Sunrise” (1995), “Before Sunset”
(2004), and “Before Midnight” (2013); and the logical – though radical –
extension of the trilogy concept, 2014’s “Boyhood” filmed over the course of 11 years. This approach – the examination
of time through real time – is Linklater’s signature method, and one wonders
where it might take him next.

The 36-year-old Lowery hails from Texas, too. Born in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin, the family moved to Irving, Texas when Lowery was seven. Whether as
an effect of the landscape of the southernmost region of the Great Plains, the
proximity to the Atlantic Gulf or the sheer size of the state, Malick,
Schnabel, Linklater – and now Lowery – share an interest in our experience of time
– the fact that we are trapped in it while possessed of the inventiveness, if
not to transcend it, at least to reimagine it. Taking very different approaches, each director contemplates the existential experience of time and its
companion, loss.

Eternity is both tragic and majestically mysterious. Not long after our
ghost has returned to his house, he goes to a window that looks out onto the
window of the house next door where he sees a similarly sheeted ghost inside.
The two ghosts exchange wordless hellos, understanding each other
telepathically. The neighbor ghost explains that she’s waiting for someone. Our
ghost asks, “Who?” “I don’t remember,” she replies.

Casey Affleck as C. Photo Credit: Bret Curry. Courtesy of A24

In the conclusion to his review of “A Ghost Story” for the New Yorker,
Anthony Lane describes the point after the two now empty, decrepit houses are
bulldozed as “the saddest detail of all”: The two ghosts stand amidst their
respective rubble, and the neighbor ghost says (whom I refer to above as
“she”), “‘I don’t think they’re coming.’ At this precise instant, he folds—just
crumples and drops, leaving nothing but a wrinkled sheet on the ground. The
waiting was all he had. I must have watched special effects worth hundreds of
millions of dollars this year, but nothing has rent the heart as much as this
plain low-budget collapse, and it makes you wonder: Was that a soul in
Purgatory, and is he now at peace? Or do the dead themselves pass on, living
here until their hopeless cause expires, and dying thus around us every day?”

I agree with Lane about the intensity of this moment sans any CGI
ostentation, but I did not find it altogether sad. Rather, I read this scene as
one of hope. Neither that some greater force condemns us to a Purgatory from
which we are released after a designated time nor that we die a second literal kind
of death. Might there be hope in choice, in our own agency to give ourselves up
to a cycle that is universal and eternal?

In an early scene, M explains to C that, as she has moved from house to
house through life, she leaves a tiny note hidden in each – something it is in
our human nature to do – leave a piece of ourselves behind, something that says
“I was here.” This theme, the desire to leave our mark, circles through “A Ghost
Story,” and in that regard, the film is also a story about art – and what is
art but an expression of love. Perhaps it is only great artists who leave a mark
with any meaningful impact, but we all make some gesture, even if it’s just a
tiny slip of paper that carries our handwriting pushed into a crack in the
woodwork by which we hope to be remembered. Yet in time, even memory will be
lost. We will no longer remember those we’ve loved and lost. But time will go
inexorably on – in its grandeur and its indifference.

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Nancy Kempf holds a B.A. in Literature with a minor in Philosophy from the Oklahoma College of Liberal Arts, which was the first institution of higher education in the U.S. to develop a rigorous interdisciplinary curriculum. She completed graduate work toward a Ph.D. at the University of Oklahoma. She has taught English at the Universities of Oklahoma and Arkansas and the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, and has written and lectured extensively on American and world cinema, including contributing articles to Berkshire Fine Arts, New York Theatre Wire and ARTES Magazine.